Is, isn’t, pardie, seeing how the frog
Straddles both in an ikizukuri
Parody, its eyes blinking ardently
And abruptly, I should remove to hate
All culture, for does it not subjugate
Me, in my gaze confuse what existed
And what exists yet? Am I not listed
On the paranormal database, like
Those moon-heeled sylphs who witnesses claim strike
Out for the bank only to hang reposed
Above the stream? The virtue thus proposed
As advisable, by implicature,
To remove in order to hate culture
Is tolerance; and as I walk my dog
This evening, passing households in a ward
Claimed by the Tories, and feeling ignored,
I could almost join them in their mistrust
Of others; but then glancing up, and just
In the moments it takes me to walk by,
I see through a window a girl that I
Know to be eight or nine, for she is in
My daughter's school year, and a more sanguine
Appraisal of existence, reconciled
With tolerance and all ideals compiled
Within grace's fardel, forms in my mind.
Alone in her bedroom, how mild, how kind
She seems, looking pensively into her
Dressing mirror, holding what I infer
To be a hairbrush. What is she thinking?
She was not here 10 years ago. I bring
My dog, Larkin, to heel, and I am passed,
Part precariat, part iconoclast.
What is there but that I am not heeded,
What is there but that I am not needed?
There is a paternal streak from afar.

Culture prises the spirit from the pineal gland,
And my essence, displaced, is witnessed by the Scole Group
On a sealed roll of film, wherefore my skull, like the land
Pronounced in verses that incite the Jews to recoup
What is their own, should call to me, being lost, arouse
In me a yearning to return so that I may house
Myself once again within its confines, to connect;
But unlike those who only feel safe when they elect
To stay within the borders of a promised land, my
Spirit could avaunt of the skull and afford to lie
Elsewhere and be content, in posterity of art
Or that paternal streak from afar; swap the rampart
Of a sinus-ridden case for an eternal life,
That whilst anon I make a widow of my wife,
My children are assured how I love them and my verse
Can resonate. Retorts by Exodus that coerceA people, ferociously, to remain destitute
Are as abhorrent as those shrill attempts to refute
Israel's existence. Third eye calcified, soul gone,
To float unadulterated, internimbus on
Jordan's banks, paying no heed to hymn books of shape note,
Immune to IS, Hamas or the Zionist vote,
Unimpressed by Tories or Labour or Russell Brand:
But even here, removed thus from the pineal gland,
My spirit detests the anti-Semite who, trying
To appear reasonable and so understanding,
Talks of the Jewish people in terms of "I know one".

My third eye is calcified and my spirit has gone:
I will be immortal, perhaps in a lullaby
Sung to Chinese children, like fathers sing of Li Bai
Leaning too far from his boat to capture a moon-heeled
Sylph, or exclusively in the Scole Hole, on that sealed
Roll of film proffered by Thomas Edison.